DIY Fork Mount (for bike rack cheap-o's)

1) Go to your garage or LBS (local bike shop) to find a taco'ed bike wheel from which you can clip the hub. Make sure it fits the bike you intend to haul around on top of your car, and find a a quick release skewer that will fit.
2) You better take a break: this has been pretty strenuous so far. Have a refreshing beverage.
3) Get an angle grinder, metal file, gritty sand paper, or use your teeth to make flat spots on the hub where it will rest on the roof rack's cross-bars. If you have Yakima bars (round) instead of Thule (rectangular), then make your flat spots convex to roughly fit the radius of the bar.
4) Go to your garage or LHS (local hardware store) and pick up a U-bolt that will fit snugly over your hub and cross-bar. If the threaded portions of the U-bolt are too long, you can just hack them off with a saw at later.
5) Fasten the hub to your bars with the U-bolt, and tighten it down.
6) Throw your expensive carbon-fiber mountain bike up there.
7) Cruise down the interstate
8) Go back to where your bike fell off and pick up the pieces off the road.
8) Now, back at home, adjust your rear bar so that your bike's back wheel lands on/near it and then get a nylon strap to secure it.
9) Have another refreshing beverage and admire your work.

Refurbishing Leather Bicycle Saddle.

There is a fine line, with worn out leather bicycle saddles, between a fine "patina" and general dysfunction. This old saddle had crossed that line and was no longer usable: it broke the third time I rode it.

New leather bicycle saddles tend to start around $60 (the Brooks Titanium Swallow is $500), and I'm cheap, so I didn't want to spring for a new one. A plastic seat on this bike just didn't look right, so I decided to replace the leather. Here is what I did...

Here's the broken seat.

I pulled the old copper rivets out by unbending their back sides.

This is what the frame looks like without the leather on it. The leather gets stretched from back to front creating a sort of natural 'suspension' system.

Next, cut-out the new piece, using the old as a stencil. After a little investigation, I found that you probably want at least 8 oz. leather (this indicates how thick it is) as a minimum. 10 oz. leather is probably ideal. Most places aren't in the business of selling a single 6" x 12" piece of leather, but if you look around, you should be able to find the right seller, eventually.





Now lay the new leather over the frame and get it into position, making sure it's a good fit. Punch new holes in the leather to align with the holes in the frame (don't worry about prepping the three holes on the little front piece until you have the back part completely finished).







I found these #9 copper rivets at my local hardware store for $.27 each. I got larger washer that would slip all the way down the rivet (the #9 washer is made to stop just a fraction of the way down the tip of the rivet). Push the rivet through the leather & the hole in the metal frame, and then slip the washer on the back side.


Now it's a matter of peening the rivet (no photos for this part!). This just means that you smash the rivet's point with a hammer until it's all mushroomed and disfigured so that it won't & can't slip through the washer again, ever. It's a little tricky to peen the rivets with the seat's rails getting in your way, but you'll find the right combination of tools that were meant for something else, to make it work.



Here is the final result. NOTE: in order to keep the whole seat from flattening like a pancake, I punched a couple of holes in each of the sides and laced them together underneath. This gives the leather much better form & structure.

For more general information on leather bicycle saddles, check out Sheldon Brown's page
This old leather broke the third time I rode it, leaving me without a leather saddle.